Computer World Security

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When Apple launched its enterprise developer certificate program — which helps enterprises make their homegrown apps for employee use-only available through iTunes — it had to make a difficult convenience-vs.-security decision: how much hassle to put IT managers through to get their internal apps posted. It chose convenience and, well, you can guess what happened.

Media reports say pirate developers used the enterprise program to improperly distribute tweaked versions of popular apps — including Spotify, Angry Birds, Pokemon Go and Minecraft — while others used the platform to distribute porn apps along with real-money gambling apps. And all the bad guys had to do was lie to Apple reps about being associated with legitimate businesses. Apple didn't bother to investigate or otherwise verify the answers.

Microsoft has revised its schedule to dump support for an outdated cryptographic hash standard by postponing the deadline for Windows 7.

Microsoft, like other software vendors, digitally "signs" updates before they are distributed via the Internet. SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1), which debuted in 1995, was declared insecure a decade later, but it was retained for backward-compatibility reasons, primarily for Windows 7. Microsoft wants to ditch SHA-1 and rely only on the more-secure SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2).

Fish is being onboarded as a software engineer and has to download the code repository and start building it. But in checking the setup guide, he can’t find any instructions on what user credentials to use to log in. This seems like something he should be able to figure out, so he trolls through multiple document systems (internal websites, Google documents and wikis) until he finds an old document that says to use his username as both username and password for version control access. That’s easy enough — but it doesn’t work. Fish gets a message saying his account wasn’t found or the password didn’t match.

Time to submit a help desk ticket. And the explanation is simple. IT had neglected to run the script that created an account for fish in the version control system. Ten minutes after submitting the ticket, fish is in at last.

IT leaders who've taken the plunge into blockchain are mainly deploying it in proofs-of-concept tests to address the same problems a conventional database could handle, according to research firm Gartner.

Dubbed "Project Fission," the effort will more granularly separate sites and their individual components than is currently the case in Firefox. The goal: Isolate malicious sites and attack code so individual sites cannot wreak havoc in the browser at large, or pillage the browser, the device or the device's memory of critical information, such as authentication credentials and encryption keys.

"We aim to build a browser which isn't just secure against known security vulnerabilities, but also has layers of built-in defense against potential future vulnerabilities," Nika Layzel, the project tech lead of the Fission team, wrote in a post last week to a Firefox development mailing list. "To accomplish this, we need to revamp the architecture of Firefox and support full Site Isolation." Layzel also published the note as the first newsletter from the Fission engineering group.

Coffee shops across the planet are populated by earnest Apple Mac-wielding remote and/or freelance workers – but are they taking steps to protect themselves in a public place? Follow this checklist to make sure you are protected.

12 ways to use your Mac safely in public places
1. Worry about Wi-Fi

Public Wi-Fi networks are dangerous places, not least because you don’t really know how the network is set up or who else is sitting on the same network with you.

A bunch of apps from some major players — including Expedia, Hollister, Air Canada, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hotels.com and Singapore Airlines — recently came to grief because of a security/privacy hole in a third-party analytics app they all used, according to a report from TechCrunch. In the case of Air Canada, the incident exposed extremely sensitive customer information including payment card and password data shared in clear text. That sort of thing shouldn't be happening — and yet everyone seems focused on the wrong lesson.

Those of you who feel it’s important to install Windows and Office patches the moment they come out – I salute you. The Windows world needs more cannon fodder. When the bugs come out, as they inevitably will, I hope you’ll drop by AskWoody.com and tell us all about them.

For those who feel that, given Microsoft’s track record of pernicious patches, a bit of reticence is in order, I have some good news. Microsoft’s Security Response Center says that only a tiny percentage of patched security holes get exploited within 30 days of the patch becoming available.

You probably already use a 4-digit passcode, but you can improve that with a 6-digit or alphanumeric code.

You change this in Settings>Touch ID/Face ID & Passcode, select Change Passcode and then tap the small Passcode Options dialog. Alphanumeric codes are harder to decipher, just make sure you remember the code.

Matt Miller’s presentation at Blue Hat yesterday included some startling statistics, based on data gathered by Microsoft’s Security Response Center. The numbers starkly confirm what we’ve been saying for years: The chances of getting hit with malware by delaying Windows and Office patches for up to 30 days is tiny compared to all the other ways of getting clobbered.

The term “computer virus” calls to mind imagery of pathogenic creepy-crawlies bringing down a device’s operating system, their flagella wriggling as they multiply into hordes that infiltrate its chips and wires. And while it’s true that our computers can be infected with literal biological bacteria like staphylococci, per Science Illustrated, the threat of malicious codes and programs intent on corrupting data and files looms far larger: According to a recent study from the University of Maryland’s Clark School of Engineering, attacks on computers with internet access is virtually ceaseless, with an incident occurring every 39 seconds on average, affecting a third of Americans every year.

This conglomerate is structured as several smaller companies, with a big central IT organization plus individual IT groups in some of the companies, reports an IT pilot fish there.

“An IT staffer from one of the companies loaded a password cracker and proceeded to crack the Windows NT servers,” fish says. “He sent out emails bragging about how insecure NT was and giving the NT team a hard time.”

Fish isn’t on the NT team, but he and his security co-workers decide to strike back on behalf of their colleagues — and they do it through the central IT audit group, to make sure it’s all above board.

First, they supply the audit people with a list of more than 100 Unix servers, and get them to pick a server at random. Amazingly, the audit group picks the only server on the list that belongs to the company where the NT attack originated.

Compared to some months last year, January has been a Microsoft patching cakewalk. We had several rounds of close calls and missed calls, as I posted earlier this week, but almost everything is cleared up.

We’ve seen a few more problems raise their ugly heads in the past few days:

Microsoft has confirmed that the latest version of Office Click-to-Run (which you’re likely using if you have Office 365) makes the conversation window disappear in Skype for Business 2016.

The Windows 8.1 Monthly Rollup, KB 4480963, breaks the Live Migration feature on older AMD Opteron machines. We’re still waiting for confirmation on that one.

In general, the January patches look relatively benign, but for some folks in some situations they can bite. Hard.

On the surface we’ve seen the usual Patch Tuesday Cumulative Updates and secondary Cumulative Updates for all versions of Windows 10. Microsoft calls the secondary Cumulative Updates “optional” because you only get them if you click “Check for updates.”

Windows 7 and 8.1 got their usual Monthly Rollups, but there’s a problem. Specifically, this month’s Win7 Monthly Rollup has a couple of bugs that are only fixed if you install the preview of February’s Monthly Rollup. Which makes no sense at all, but that’s Microsoft. There’s another Win7 Monthly Rollup bug that’s fixed by installing a different “silver bullet” patch.

It's a few years after Y2K, and this pilot fish has overall responsibility for all things related to his company's website.

"Like most corporations, our company had a policy that computers and laptops were to be used only for company business, along with policies governing the appropriate use of the internet in the work environment," fish says.

"After arriving at work one morning, I opened my email to find a frantic message from our CEO to me and our internet security manager, stating that our website had been hacked."

The big boss knows this is the case because there are spammy images and text on the home page, among other issues. Not surprisingly, the CEO is adamant that this must be resolved ASAP.

Blockchain, which began to emerge as a real-world tech option in 2016 and 2017, is poised to change IT in much the same way open-source software did a quarter century ago. And in the same way Linux took more than a decade to become a cornerstone in modern application development, Blockchain will likely take years to become a lower cost, more efficient way to share information and data between open and private business networks.

Based on a distributed, peer-to-peer (P2P) topology, blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) allows data to be stored globally on thousands of servers – while letting anyone on the network see everyone else's entries in real-time. That makes it difficult for one user to gain control of, or game, the network.

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Tim Weil is a Security Architect/IT Security Manager with over twenty five years of IT management, consulting and engineering experience in the U.S. Government and Communications Industry. Mr. Weil's technical areas of expertise include IT Security Management, Enterprise Security Architecture, FISMA Compliance, Identity Management, and Network Engineering. Mr. Weil is a Senior Member of the IEEE and has served in several IEEE positions.